An Irishman's Diary

YOU WON’T get far in Glencolmcille, a wildly beautiful valley in west Donegal, without hearing the name of Father James McDyer. And you won’t get much further before someone mentions another former resident of the area, the composer Arnold Bax.

But apart from this posthumous distinction, and the great love they shared for the place while they lived, the two men could hardly be less alike.

Bax was born both wealthy and English, and when he first saw the light of day in 1883 seemed destined for a life far removed from Glencolmcille, or any part of Co Donegal. That was until, aged 19, he took the poetry of WB Yeats to heart; a condition from which he never recovered.

Untroubled by the need to make a living, he embarked on a full-time love affair with Ireland, and Ireland’s west in particular. He sought out its most remote parts. And in the surrounds of the village of Cashel, where the road from Donegal town meets the Atlantic, he found the ideal home for an artist of the romantic tradition.

“The place gets all the wind there is,” Bax wrote approvingly. But more to the point for a man who hated modernity, he added: “[. . .] life is much the same here as it was 100 years ago and there is no civilisation worth speaking of”. This was his Inisfree. In the words of Bax’s biographer, Glencolmcille would be “the fountainhead of most of his music” for the next 30 years.

The valley still feels remote today, when it can be reached – assuming you don’t hit any of the free-range sheep en route – in a 25-minute drive from Killybegs.

But during Bax’s early visits, it could be four-and-a-half hours by jaunting car from the Donegal railway terminus. The cars were uncovered too, so that as he recalled in his memoir, “sometimes I found myself on a puddle seat even before I reached Ardara to face Glengesh (a pass scheduled by the RAC as impassable for motorists) and the savagery beyond.”

James McDyer would have taken the untamed beauty of Glencolmcille for granted. He was born in another picturesque part of Co Donegal – Glenties – in 1911, by which time Bax had gone fully native in Glencolmcille: learning Irish, writing poetry under the pseudonym Dermot O’Byrne, and developing nationalist sympathies.

This last trait is something else they had in common. McDyer grew up in a community that hero-worshipped those who had led Ireland to independence. But independent or not, Co Donegal was still poor and, as the future priest might have said in one of his less lyrical moments, you couldn’t eat the scenery.

McDyer’s autobiography described the indelible impression left on his childhood by “the convoy”: the all-night gathering of friends and neighbours in the homes of those about to emigrate. There was music, dance, and drinking in these affairs. But the jollity was surface-deep; because in those times when emigrants might not return return for years, if ever, every such departure was a death in life.

After the young person was waved off in the morning, McDyer recalled, “the father would enter the house to brood over the fire; the mother would sit out on a rock beyond the cabbage garden, and remain seated there for hours gazing in the direction in which here child had gone”.

By the time – following periods in London, Brighton, and Tory Island – he was posted to Glencolmcille as a curate in 1951, McDyer had become a radical and a socialist, determined to rid the valley of its “five curses”: the lack of water-supply, electricity, industry, paved roads, and a dispensary.

Perhaps it was just as well that Bax had moved on by then. Now a knight (an honour he accepted uneasily, given his new identity) and Master of the King’s Musick, he had begun to use Scotland as his annual retreat from London, although he never renounced his love of Ireland and continued to visit frequently.

McDyer, meanwhile, went about transforming Glencolmcille with his various co-operatives. Not all his ventures were successful, and they weren’t always popular either. But for good or bad, he changed the face of a valley with which today, more than 20 years after he died, he remains synonymous.

Bax had hoped to live out his final days in the glen too. “I like to fancy that on my deathbed my last vision in this life will be the scene from my window on the upper floor at Glencolmcille,” he wrote; “of the still, brooding, dove-grey mystery of the Atlantic at twilight; the last glow of sunset behind Glen Head in the north [...] and east of it the calm slope of Scraig Beefan, its glittering many-coloured surface of rock, bracken, and heather, now one uniform purple glow.” In the event, his last vision would be of Ireland, but at the opposite end of the country. Staying with friends in Cork in 1953, he died suddenly after a trip to the Old Head of Kinsale. He was buried locally, in St Finbarr’s Cemetery.

Bax had once written of Glencolmcille as “hovering between the world we know too well and some happy otherworld that we begin to glimpse when we are growing up and never reach”. Today it hovers somewhere between his romantic ideal and the more practical one of Father McDyer. But the glen is still beautiful. And when the wind blows through it, which is most of the time, Bax would still have no trouble recognising the place.

fmcnally@irishtimes.com